I'm looking for some general advice before I attempt to write a
program to play PC speaker tunes from abc music notation
http://www.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/
(In case anyone notices a program called playabc which is
advertised as doing this, no, it actually produces a .au file
and sends it to the sound card, not the speaker.)
For FreeBSD I could produce output in the format described
in spkr(4) and send it to /dev/speaker, using perl which is
already half fathomable to me. I'm not sure if there's another
way to play the speaker more directly, but I suspect there is
one that clever people know about and that would require C
or worse. I'm looking at /usr/local/src/sys/i386/isa/spkr.c
and wishing I understood what it's trying to tell me.
Linux users report they have no speaker device, and I've
never found a Linux user who plays speaker tunes.
Other types of unix are even more of a mystery.
So my question is, if I were to output strings to /dev/speaker,
would it only work on FreeBSD? And if so, is there another
approach I could take to make the program useful to more of
the PC speaker tune fanatics who might want to use it on
unix-like systems? If so it might be worth investing
considerably more effort. Or is in in the nature of these
wonderful antique musical instruments that any solution
has to be OS-dependent?
(An email cc would be appreciated, since IANAH.)
--
Regards,
-*Sue*-
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